The Lead

Two former federal agents have been charged with wire fraud, money laundering and related offenses for stealing digital currency during their investigation of the Silk Road, an underground black market that allowed users to conduct illegal transactions over the Internet, the Department of Justice has announced.

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The National Security Agency considered abandoning its secret program to collect and store American calling records in the months before leaker Edward Snowden revealed the practice, current and former intelligence officials say, because some officials believed the costs outweighed the meager counterterrorism benefits.

You lose your wallet on a busy Michigan Avenue. Or you forget your phone in a crowded restaurant — and all your private information just sits there, waiting to be found. As gut-wrenching as it may feel, a Chicago "bio-artist" wonders if some day you might feel the same dread from your discarded coffee cup, or chewed-up piece of gum, or a single strand of hair left in public.

The last time Jeffrey Vargos's family saw their son alive he was riding his bike in an Anaheim, California neighborhood in July of 1981. The next day his body was found at a construction site more than 20 miles away in Pomona. Vargos had been strangled to death.

The recent large-scale DDoS attacks against GitHub and anti-censorship group Greatfire.org are likely to signal the start of a major new attack campaign by China against foreign internet sites, according to Greatfire.

Using a two-dimensional, hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms, called graphene, researchers say they have observed small structural changes to the material in a “measurably different way” that can be used to detect the four nucleobases, according to a report from the University of Melbourne. A unique combination of these nucleobases – adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine – create the individual genetic DNA.

Taiwan wants to join a major anti-hacking drill conducted by the United States to strengthen cyber security ties with its staunchest ally, its vice premier said on Monday, a move which would help safeguard against constant targeting by hackers in rival China.

On Friday, GitHub, the open-source software code collaboration site, said they were experiencing the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in github.com's history, according to their blogpost.

Indianapolis-based Strand Analytical Laboratories, which was started a decade ago to run DNA tests on crime scene evidence, now spends most of its time helping solve false positives on cancer biopsies.

In the young, billion-dollar growth sector of threat intel, vendors are falling over themselves to offer a confusingly diverse array of threat intelligence products. That's because right now, organizations know they need to 'do' threat intelligence - yet few understand, or can agree on what that means.

Rescuers are still, however, to locate the plane’s second black box — its flight data recorder — six days after the Barcelona to Düsseldorf flight crashed into a rocky ravine at 435 miles (700km) per hour.

University researchers have developed a new way of identifying substances in fingermarks left at crime scenes, which has the potential to be a key weapon for detectives attempting to bring criminals to justice.